He came awake looking at something like the sun and realizing he was being conveyed roughly away from the brilliant thing he was interested in. He was in a blanket turned into a hammock or sling in which he was being dragged somewhere else. His behind was suffering, which was only fair since unlike other main parts of his body nothing had been done to it to make it hurt. Two people were moving him along.
His mind was on the thing it had been on just before this, it was on Dwight Wemberg. It was important. He wanted to get up and get out and do something. The man had a history that had to be honored and it was unthinkable that his body might be left in the terrible desert. It couldn’t be allowed to happen, because it had been the agony over his wife’s body, being unable to reclaim it, that had led him out into extremis and his own death. There was some kind of parity that had to be honored. Wemberg’s body had to go back to Gaborone,
Two men were hauling him along. One of them was Kevin. He could communicate with Kevin. The other man was a stranger. He was wild-looking, a rustic, very thin, wearing seedpod armlets. He was straight out of the bush.
Kevin would understand about Wemberg. And if he didn’t, there were others he could inform about the problem. Except that he was being dragged away from the center of things, because of the fire.
He didn’t like to look at the fire, but he was facing it so he had to. He would never be able to come here with Iris, assuming that the world could have evolved in some inconceivable way, their world, and that Ngami Bird Lodge existed in that world… It was burning to the ground before his eyes, they could never come here. This would have been if she was through with Morel or he was through with her, if by some unimaginable turn of events either one of those things had happened and he had somehow heard about it.
The entire roof was in flames, it was a platform for spikes and leaping snakes of fire. It was crownlike. And smoke was beginning to leak and pour from the windows of the second floor, and that would be because burning stuff from the roof would be dropping down and setting the wainscoting, the carved wainscoting he had liked so much, and the other carved appurtenances, on fire. It would all burn. The furniture would burn, the beds, the bolsters, the rugs.
“Stop,” he said to Kevin.
“We must go as far as that,” Kevin answered, pointing. Ray couldn’t see where that was.
“This is far enough, isn’t it?”
“No, rra.”
Explosions, five or six of them, very loud, caused Kevin and the other man to speed up. The explosions had come from the east end of the burning building.
“It is ammunition, now,” Kevin said.
So it was prudent to get well away. Obviously there hadn’t been time to extract all the munitions or other gear the witdoeke might have wanted.
“I can walk, Kevin, rra. I can.”
At least he thought he could. He looked down at himself. He had been tended to, somewhat. There was oil on his skin. Someone had put a longsleeved shirt on him, not a clean shirt, a filthy one, but that was all right. It wasn’t oil on his skin, it was Vaseline. He had his boots, still. His bad knee was crimson, but it was nothing but Mercurochrome, the redness, on Quartus’s bite mark there. He felt his bad knee. He had to suppress a groan. Still, he knew he could get around. He had a knobkerrie. It was somewhere. Probably it was in the building and on fire itself. So he didn’t have a knobkerrie to prop himself up with.
“Stop
They obeyed. Ray wanted to jump up. He couldn’t, quite. He rolled out of the sling he was in and got on all fours and laboriously got erect.
“You see,” he said, and immediately fell down.
They put him back in his hammock and dragged him along to the sound of even greater explosions. The entire building was going. He could see people running around like ants. Sobeit, he thought. And he went into darkness again.
He was awake. He was on a slight incline, he was beyond all the outbuildings. It was getting late.
He was by himself. He had been left there like a turd on a doily.
He stood up. He had the bundle under one arm and he was clutching the waist of his shorts tight. He thought he could manage his right leg.
And the conflagration was absolute, nothing would be saved. It was peach and black. He needed Kevin.
Things were going on near the conflagration he needed to be part of. He had to hobble toward the event.
It was hard, going there.
And his comrades the witdoeke were doing something that had to be stopped. They were throwing bodies into the flames and one of those might be Wemberg’s. He didn’t know. He needed to discuss Wemberg with them.
He needed to find Kevin, Morel too.
“Hey,” he shouted, entering the heat from the conflagration.
He saw people he knew.
“Here I am,” he said to Morel and Kevin and, there he was, Kerekang.
It was Kerekang, sitting on an overturned washtub, exhausted-looking, gray in the face, his hair grown long. He was wearing a witdoek, appropriately enough. He was wearing a fur vest and he had bandoliers crossed over his chest. He looked Mexican somehow. His arms were sinewy but too thin. He was wearing cargo pants whose pockets were loaded with things. He was wearing sandals. He was looking at the ground.
Ray went up to Kerekang. He cleared his throat. He had too many things he wanted to say.
“Dumela, rra,” he said. Kerekang looked up.
“We have met,” Ray said.
Kerekang stood up. He looked at Ray and then looked differently at him. He had heard about Ray’s exploit, it was obvious.
Kerekang strode up to him and embraced him too hard. Ray was in danger of losing his balance, briefly.
The dead had been collected into a heap and a pair of men with bandannas over their faces were taking one body at a time and running with it through the zone of heat around the building and getting as close as they could to the flaming doorway Ray and Morel had entered after their escape from the shed and hurling the body into it. The bodies had been stripped. The work had just begun. There were fifteen bodies, at a first rough estimate, waiting to be incinerated.
Kevin was with him. Ray asked him how many bodies had gone into the flames and Kevin held up three fingers.
Kerekang was sitting again. He seemed to be in a kind of reverie. He looked caved-in, was the way Ray described it to himself.
Ray needed a belt. Kevin would help him.
“Kevin, can you get me a belt?”
“Ehe, rra.” He seemed to have an idea. Ray saw what it was. Kevin was going to the litter of clothing taken from the dead. You’ll have your choice of belts, Ray thought.
And it was so. Kevin brought him three belts to choose from. He took the shortest one and threaded it through the belt loops. But with the tongue in the last punch hole, the belt was still too slack, so he discarded that belt and took the longest one instead and secured it with a knot. He felt ready then.
He considered the tableau he was part of. They were in an open space beyond the outbuildings, one of which had been his prison. Which reminded him that Morel was not in evidence. He was full of anxiety. There was Kerekang, on the washtub, now bracketed by armed men. More fighters were filing in from the pan, their legs and shoes and lower pants legs covered with white dust like tooth powder. The pan was dry as bones. But where was Morel?
The staff people from Ngami Lodge were present. All the faces he had seen in his moments on the first floor were there. They had survived. That was good. He would talk to them later, if he could, say something, thank Dirang and the old man again.
